Drawing from Home: The Impact of Intimacy

March 24, 2020

Taken from the recent publication by Royal Drawing School, Ways of Drawing, The Impact of Intimacy is an exercise designed by faculty member Ishbel Myerscough. All you need is a sitter, drawing materials and paper.

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Who: a single or group of drawers, and a sitter With: pencils, charcoal, ink - any drawing materials you have to hand

More often than not, when drawing we impose our world on the model. This session involves asking the sitter some questions, with the aim of making more personal drawings of them.

Set up the model in the middle. The model should sit for a series of six five-minute poses, turning with each pose so that you can draw them from each angle.

Then, ask the model to take a longer pose, perhaps two forty-five-minute sessions of the same pose. This time, the artists should ask the model questions to get to know them better. Where did they grow up? Do they have siblings? Have they ever had short hair? How did they choose what they are wearing today?

The experiment in this session is to see whether drawings are altered by having this information, in contrast with the assumptions we might usually make about those we draw.

Ishbel Myerscough studied at Glasgow school of Art from 1987-91. After graduating she painted in a studio in Glasgow for two years, before going on to the Slade School of Art to do a postgraduate in 1993. She won the National Portrait Gallery BP Portrait Award in 1995, and has since completed two portrait commissions for their collection. She was represented by Anthony Mould for 20 years, having several exhibitions with him, and is now represented by Flowers Gallery.